The end of agapastic development is the evolutionary process itself (of the cosmos, of thought, of language, of the subject), continuity in signifying processes, of semiosis in general. Creative evolution is beaten out at the rhythm of hypotheses, discoveries and qualitative leaps through the combined effect of agapasticism, attraction among interpretants, and synechism, so that no single existent, idea or individual is conceivable in isolation from anything else. From the viewpoint of subjectivity, far from being solitary the self is a communicating entity in becoming, moved by desire and oriented by Agape. Therefore, from an evolutionary perspective, by virtue of the synechetic continuity of thought and creative love, agapic or sympathetic comprehension and recognition is the dominant force in the deferral among signs; and the simultaneous occurrence of a genial idea to a number of individuals not endowed with any particular powers, and, what’s more, independently of each other (a consequence of belonging to the same great semiosphere) may well be considered as testifying to this (cf. CP 6.315–316).
6. Enter semioethics
Both Peirce and Welby attempt to develop a global science of signs and meaning that can account for semiosic processes, human and nonhuman, verbal and nonverbal in all their diversity, complexity and articulation. In relation to the specifically human world this also means to account for meaning not only in terms of signification, but also of significance or sense. It is not possible to study the life of signs in merely descriptive terms, with claims to neutrality. Such an approach can only be partial and is inadequate for a full understanding of the self moved by forces animating the universe it inhabits. Instead, an adequate understanding of human signs, consciousness and behaviour calls for a conception of signs whose boundaries extend not only in the direction of ‘zoosemiotics’ and ‘biosemiotics’, as proposed by Sebeok (1979, 2001), but also in the direction of what, developing both Peirce and Welby, we might call ‘cosmosemiotics’, which encompasses ‘geosemiotics’ and ‘heliosemiotics’ (cf. Petrilli 1998a; Petrilli and Ponzio 2001, 2002, 2005). Working in such a framework has led to developments in the direction of ‘semioethics’ and its focus on the relation of signs to values.
‘Semioethics’ is a neologism which has its origins in the early 1980s with ‘ethosemiotics’. Subsequently it was introduced as the title of a monograph in Italian, Semioetica (2003), co-authored by Augusto Ponzio and myself (see Deely 2010: 49–50). The term ‘semioethics’ designates an approach to the study of signs and life we believe necessary today more than ever before in the context of globalization (Petrilli and Ponzio 2010). Semioethics is not intended as a discipline in its own right, but as a perspective, an orientation in the study of signs which recovers the ancient vocation of semiotics for the care of life, of semiotics originally understood as ‘semeiotics’ (or symptomatology) thanks to its focus on symptoms. In the context of the relation between signs and values, therefore between semiotics and axiology, a major issue for semioethics today with reference to semiosis in the human world is the problem of caring for the signs of life and the life of signs in a global perspective. With his ‘global semiotics’ Thomas A. Sebeok (2001) posits that semiosis and life converge. With reference to semiosis in the human world and keeping account of the relation of signs to values, this axiom inevitably leads to the need to account for the relation between signs, life and responsibility.
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